It is important to know whether your site will be eligible for a specific program. Publishers will be accepted into the program based on the following criteria Quality and appropriateness of site, Volume of traffic, at least a one-dollar sign ranking in the Commission Junction network, Own domain name, Compliant with the Commission Junction publisher service agreement, Directly related to performance marketing. So this criteria are very essential. Check if something is wrong or does not makes sense, it is better to neglect it.

Is there a Fee to Join the Program?

Most of the affiliate programs does not charge fees or payments. If a site charged for fees then it can’t be considered as a affiliate programs. That is not an affiliate program but it is called as Multi-Level Marketing scheme or MLM. An example of MLM is the Six Figure Income which helps and inspire home-based entrepreneurs. In order to earn income from SFI, you must a one of the company’s products each and every month to have sales earnings. Likewise, the program should require exclusivity or privacy. When you sign-up with a one company that would mean that you must promise not to have partnerships with the others. You must not take this as a disadvantage because once you become a partner of a company, better products or services will eventually come along.

How Much is the Commission? Indeed, in business it is really one of the most important thing to consider is knowing your profit or commission. In internet marketing, you need to compare the payout rates between the affiliate programs you are planning to join. Like for example, if you are planning to join a market about banking. Visit the commission soup and they will give you lists of advertisers who engaged in banking. By selecting “lead” from the interface, advertisers are listed and sorted according to their pay-out per lead.

There are a few Web site design guidelines that every budding Web site designer should keep in mind in order to attract more traffic to their site, because there’s nothing like a poorly designed site to instantly lose traffic and alienate potential visitors. While there are some exceptions to this rule, for the most part this holds true for the majority of Web sites out there.

You can have the best written content and the most targeted keywords on the Net, but if your website is visually jarring or completely confusing navigation-wise, you might be missing out on some potential traffic.

Optimizing your pages for the search engines is absolutely essential if you want them to appear in the top 10 – 30 positions of results. High-ranking pages are even more critical if you’ll be starting your affiliate business with a very small or non-existent promotional budget and won’t be using pay-per-clicks and other forms of advertising.

Here is a list of tips to help you get your pages to rank high in the search engine results.

KEYWORD-RICH PAGES. In the past you had to be extremely careful not to overuse your keyword phrases for fear that the search engines would consider you an engine spammer and penalize you. Six per page was the maximum number of repetitions suggested.

KEYWORD-RICH PAGE NAMES. Name your pages using keywords relevant to the product sold on that page, or the most relevant content. For example, if my page were about Proform Treadmills, I would call the page exactly that ‘proform-treadmills.html’.

SITE MAP. Offer your visitors a site map with links that point to all the important pages and sections of your site. If your site consists of one hundred or more pages, you may wish to break the site map up into separate pages.

RELEVANT CONTENT. Jill Whalen, a well-known search engine (SE) expert advises that you should work with at least 250 words on a page for search engine optimization purposes. More or less words will also work, but she makes the point that you need at least 250 words so that you can repeat your keyword phrases a number of times throughout the page without seeming ‘dopey’.

ELIMINATE CLUTTER. Search engines don’t read graphics or javascript, and they get confused when they encounter nested tables. If all that stuff precedes the first most important keyword phrases on your page, your ranking may be lowered as the SE considers that phrase less relevant, due to its low placement on the page.

META TAGS. The 2 Meta Tags that you need to be most concerned about are the Title and Description tags.

Title Tags – The title tag is perhaps one of the most crucial factors in how a search engine will rank your site. The text you use in the title tag must include your most relevant keyword phrases. It must also make sense, as the title tag text is the wording that appears in the reverse bar of your browser. That’s the blue bar right across the top of your browser window. It is also what the text that most of the search engines will display as the title for your listing.

Description Tag – Some search engines will use the text contained in your meta description tag as your listing description. The meta description tag also influences your site’s ranking in the engines, so you should repeat your primary keyword phrase once or twice in the description.

Note about Keyword Tags – I remember a time when we all ’stuffed’ our keyword meta tags with every keyword relevant to our sites – and then added some more. Nowadays only Inktomi, and perhaps Teoma, apparently index sites using the keyword meta tag. Most search engine experts advise that the keyword meta tag is no longer worth your time or trouble. I don’t think that adding a couple of keywords to a meta tag is any trouble at all, so I continue to add them to my pages.

ALT Tags – The ALT tag, which stands for ‘alternative text’, is primarily for use when the image is not being displayed. They were intended to make your site more accessible to visually impaired folks using text readers. Furthermore, as search engines don’t index images, any text on your site that is presented in image format won’t get indexed. To solve this problem, you can enter the image description in the ALT tag. To be sure that the search engines recognize all the content on your site, always fill in your ALT tags filled with keywords. This boosts your keyword frequency and will help your site get a better ranking.

DYNAMIC PAGES. Dynamic pages, which deliver content based on user input or other variables, can be more useful and responsive to visitor needs than regular static HTML pages. However, if while indexing a search engine encounters a dynamically generated page, as distinguished by a question mark (?) in the URL, the SE stops indexing the site at that point. Here are a few tips to get your dynamic pages indexed.

AVOID TRICKS AND DECEPTION. Google makes similar site quality recommendations to those below to help you avoid having your site removed from their index.

Don’t deceive your users by presenting different content to search engines than isdisplayed on your pages. A common trick in the past was to include highly popular but irrelevant keywords in meta tags to get ‘the click’. While that brought traffic to the site, the visitor was disappointed by results that had nothing to do with their search, and the engines appeared not to be able to produce relevant results. The search engines now pay attention to such tactics and will remove those using deceptive practices from their index.

Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings.

This includes using hidden text or links, sneaky redirects; pages loaded with irrelevant keywords and the use of ‘doorway’ pages. Google also recommends against creating subdomains and domains with essentially duplicate content.This includes using hidden text or links, sneaky redirects; pages loaded with irrelevant keywords and the use of ‘doorway’ pages. Google also recommends against creating subdomains and domains with essentially duplicate content.

Losing an amount of money, especially when you made effort to earn that money but will just be lost because of theft or in online marketing, is called affiliate link hijacking and it can be very heart-breaking.

There are two types of commission thieves, consumers and other affiliates.

Consumers steal affiliate commissions by removing an affiliate’s ID from the URL prior to clicking through to the site. How do they change the URL to cheat the affiliate? Example your affiliate URL is http://www.one-and-only.com/index.htm?AssociateID=6486. A consumer, with cruel intention will see that URL in their browser status bar when their cursor is placed over the link. To prevent credit going to my link, they could either type One and Only’s main URL, http://one-and-only.com directly into their browser’s address window. They could also right click the link and then copy and paste it into the address window and then remove the AssociateID=6486 portion of the link before they clickthrough to the site.

Other Affiliates will use the same techniques. However, they swap your affiliate ID for their own to get the commission when they buy the product. In effect, they are discounting their own purchase.

To prevent affiliate commission theft, there are methods you could apply.

1. On Mouse Over– it will show text of your choosing in the status bar when someone places his/her cursor over your link. But unfortunately, your link can be seen when its right-clicked. So how could you eliminate this function?

2. Disable Right-Click– Here’s the script that that pops a message when someone uses right-click to try and see your link coding.

You could actually change the the message “this function is disabled” replaced it with what you want. But again this is not yet a safe method.To see the link coding on a right-click disabled page, all one needs to do is use “View Source” and look at the HTML page source.

3. Affiliate Link Cloaking Software- This method is easy to use. You just need to buy a software that would cloak your affiliate link. However, there are sites today that offers free affiliate link cloaking.

Be equipped with these methods. Don’t be fooled by those mean hackers. Beat them!

A lot of new Affiliate marketers commit mistakes which are sometimes repeated over and over again. But for super affiliates they’ve learned not to make the mistake of repeating the following errors:

1. Spam- is unsolicited email. This would be very time consuming and irritating. Watch out for unrealistic email promotions that offer deals for ‘leads’, i.e. $99.95 for 500M emails. Sending email to those addresses is spamming pure and simple.

2. Posting Ads on Forums- similar with the concept of spamming. Posting Advertising on message boards gets the poster band. Avoid acting in ways that upset the board owners.

3. No Market Research– don’t be that stupid to build a site and sell products without undergoing market research. Test the waters before investing time and money into a new product.

4. Using Merchant Advertising Copy- be competitive and creative enough to innovate or improve the advertising copy. Do not rely on the copy prepared by the merchant.Successful affiliates set themselves apart from other affiliates promoting the same products.

5. Copyright Infringement- Always ask permission to use graphic images or text found on another site. I bet you don’t want to find an exact copy of your site on someone else’s domain.

6. Submitting to FFA’s– there are negative effects in submitting sites for free for all sites. Most FFA’s have such low rankings, it will drag your ranking down with it by association. Bad move.

7. Shouting- Using all capital letters in text or correspondence is symbolic of shouting, and shouting at people just makes them leave.

8. Slow or No Response to Visitor eMails- Visitors don’t want to wait long. If a visitor takes the time to send a question by email to an affiliate and the affilate doesn’t reply in a timely manner. The visitor will go somewhere else.

9. Overuse of Pop-Ups- Getting hit by multiple pop-ups is annoying. Many surfers will choose to close their browser completely rather than click ‘x’ 20 times. No browser – no sale.

11. No Site Outline- Without a blueprint or a map of a project, it will take much longer, cost more money and may end elsewhere than intended. Simplify the project by having a plan.

12. No Opt-in Newsletter- Without an opt-in list, you cannot contact visitors when they go. Those who sign up to receive your newsletters or ads are telling you that they’re interested in the products you offer.

13. Keeping Poor or No Records- keep track of all your business activities. This is very basic if you are having a business, even in online marketing.

14.Building a Mall- As a main or only site, unfocused mall sites don’t get traffic from the engines, and they don’t convert well to sales. Highly focused theme sites attract traffic and sales.

15. Pay to Advertise Offline- This is a waste of money. Most people don’t type in a URL on their computer, that they’ve seen in the newspaper or magazine.

17. Competition Bashing- work professionally.Speaking ill of others only gives the basher a bad reputation. Mind your own business and do your own business.

18. Advertising Product Prices- If the price has changed, the inconsistency will cause the visitor to question everything else that he or she reads about the product.

19. Time Sensitive Advertising- Time sensitive advertising is best used only in email advertising campaigns.Banners or text links that expire are guaranteed to eventually send your visitor to a broken link or show a broken graphic on your page.

20. ‘Leaky’ Links- Do not bring visitors to your site, then send them to another site through anything other than an affiliate link that pays.

21. Affiliate Links on the Homepage- Give them a chance to browse, sign up for your newsletter and decide that they’d like to come back to your place.

22. Doing it All Yourself- Don’t force your self too much on the things you are not familiar or capable of. Save time and avoid frustration in areas that don’t interest you by hiring someone who is an expert.

23. Not Investing in Education- Technology changes with amazing speed. To keep up on this rapidly evolving industry, you must invest time and money in research.

24. Failing to Act- Be persistent enough. Act! you’ll never know and enjoy the incredible rewards waiting just for you!

25. No Persistence- Again, be persistent enough to face the hardships and trials along the way. It will be hard if you think it would be hard. Think positively.Persistence is the single most important factor in determining success online or off. Be persistent and be successful!

March 21, 2010

I think that offline marketing methods for affiliate sites are for the most part a waste of time, and time IS money. However, if you have lots of both to spare, you may want to consider the following ways to go ‘al fresco’ with your site.

1. Car decals – No doubt you’ve seen many cars plastered with Dot Com decals, and made a mental not toyourself to check out the web site when you got home or to your office.

2. Business cards – These are highly effective marketing tools when you remember to put them in your wallet.

3. Personalized Stationery – Although it’s unlikely that you will need to have business stationery printed as an affiliatemarketer, I do recommend that you include your URL on any and all letters that you write.

4. Speaking Engagements – Offer to share your knowledge by speaking about your area of specialization at seminars andclubs.

5. Classified Ads – Advertise your site in the classifieds section of local and regional newspapers. Do a small testfirst to see whether the return on investment (ROI) will be worthwhile.

6 .Press Releases – Do you have an event scheduled or breaking news related to your site’s topic? Send out a pressrelease to announce it to the world! For example, a dating site might send out a press releaseabout the numbers of singles who use the Internet to meet just prior to Valentine’s Day. A well writtenrelease can dramatically increase your sales, expose your company to the masses, andgreatly enhance the image of your business or products.

7. Trade Publications – The cost to advertise in a trade publication or journal can be prohibitive if you are starting ahome-based affiliate marketing business on a budget. But it might still be worth yourconsideration.

8. Wear Your URL – Have some hats or t-shirts printed with your URL and logo and wear them proudly. Give themaway so others may do the same. There is a slight chance someone will see and remember yoursite’s URL until they get home to their computer.

9. Promotional items – Become a sponsor at a conference related to your industry. Hundreds, if not thousands, oftargeted consumers will be looking at your URL every time they pick up your pen or look at yourmouse pad.

10. Tell Your Friends and Family – it’s not really that effective, some visits immediately and were soon the proud recipients of several rave reviews. But months later, many still haven’t seen your homepage.

11. Happy Customers – This is one way to market offline that is worth its weight in gold. When your customers are happy with what you serve them they are likely to spread the word about your site and that is always a good thing.

Search engine crawlers visit sites and automatically build listings, generally without the need to submit your site. To get picked up by the crawlers, you need to have good links pointing to your site. The best link to get is a paid listing in the Yahoo! directory. Having that Yahoo! link, will almost guarantee you a visit from Google’s spider, and a free Google listing by result. Getting found on the major engines is important. In order to do this, your pages must be optimized and submitted individually. Page optimization and submissions are dealt with in more detail in an earlier section.

Group and Forum Postings

Yahoo, Google, MSN and other major portal sites have discussion groups and clubs to which you can post messages. I recommend taking time to research the groups you are interested in before posting. When you do post, make sure your message is not a blatant advertisement for your site. Responding to another group member’s question with valuable information is the best way to gain respect and credibility in the groups. If members want to learn more about you and your business, let them find you through your signature line that links to your website.

FFA’s

In your quest for traffic, you’ll probably come across FFA, or Free For All, sites as well. Theylook OH so promising – ‘Submit your URL to have your site appear on THOUSANDS of pages across our Network”. Webmasters list their URL’s on the FFA page in hopes of generating traffic to their site. However, when you post to an FFA site, you get one line or a couple hundred characters to describe your site. Chances are good that your link will never be seen. FFA’s are nothing more than rotating lists of links.

Each and every time a site is submitted, the FFA site owner sends a confirmation email to the contact address provided by the listing webmaster. THAT is the real purpose of the FFA site. The FFA owner collects email addresses so he can send out his advertising message. He already knows that you, the listing webmaster, are interested in getting traffic to your web site, so he targets his message in that direction. In most cases, he’ll offer to sell you a service that promises to submit your site to THOUSANDS of FFA posting sites and search engines… and all for the low, low price of $59. Wow! In return, you’ll receive THOUSANDS more confirmation emails from all those other FFA site owners.

If you don’t have much money to spend advertising your online business, writing ezine articles is one of the most effective and least costly way to attract visitors to your site.

More people are using the Internet everyday to find information. To satisfy this growing quest, ezine owners who don’t have time to write their own material are always looking for fresh articles to publish in their newsletters. I have friends who are into Affiliate Marketing and some of them are web page designers and some are articles writers, writing articles seems to sound so easy but sometimes it is very tiring be cause you have to think of the write words that would fit to your topic and you have to share good information. Also, when writing articles you have to consider that your topic should be relevant to your website theme. The most compelling reason to write articles for submission to ezines is the amount you save in advertising. A single ezine ad can cost anywhere from a few dollars to thousands of dollars. However, ezine article submissions are free. In fact, it actually pays for you to write and submit articles to ezines and newsletters!

How to Use Auctions to Sell Affiliate Products

If you want to expose your products to 22 million people in over 100 countries then consider ‘eBay’. Since 1995, eBay has hosted over 2 billion auctions. The site receives over 1.8 billion page views per week, has products selling in over 7,800 categories and over 40 million registered users. About 10 million eBay users visit eBay at least once per week.

That is an extraordinary market, and one that a growing number of affiliates are accessing to promote their products. But to warn you before you rush off to start listing your affiliate products on eBay. Affiliate products may not be sold directly on eBay’s site. Be sure to understand the auction site’s rules and regulations completely before you start to place listings.

Site Submission Services & Software

A keyword search on ‘website submission’ or ‘submission services’ at Google or Yahoo yields hundreds of companies offering to submit your site to the search engines for a fee.

Many of these services say they’ll hand-submit your site to hundreds of engines all for the unbelievably low price of $9 – or for incredibly good value at $999. But actually, you can submit to these yourself for free you will however need to submit regularly as search engines drop your site after a period of time unless re-submitted.

Ezines/Newsletters are published in the internet over hundreds and thousands. Placing advertising in ezines is a low-cost and extremely effective way to bring qualified traffic to your site. Chances are excellent that there are many ezines published on a topic relevant to your site. The Directory of Ezines is an excellent resource for quickly finding ezines targeted to your audience.

Permission email marketing works! Building an opt-in list is the most cost-effective and valuable method of marketing on the Internet. This is what you call ‘permission-based marketing’ where your subscriber willingly signed-up or “opted-in” to receive your information that would allow you to:

• Offer products and services for sale to that subscriber

• Survey subscribers to gather information for new products

• Build a rapport with the subscribers

Once you have built a list of a few hundred subscribers, keeping that list up-to-date on an ongoing basis can be a complicated and time-consuming process. So, it is recommended that you use a professional “mailing list service” to keep on top of your list(s) for you. These services automatically handle all your signups, unsubscriptions, and bounces.

The biggest advantage to having a professional service maintain your mailing list is that it protects you from spam complaints. Most affiliate networks that permit email marketing of their merchants’ offerings insist that you be able to produce evidence of subscriber opt-in.

Publish an Ezine, eCourse or Both

Most Internet marketers invite visitors to join their mailing lists by offering a free newsletter. When published regularly, a good newsletter brings visitors back to your site over and over again, exposing them to all the wonderful products and services you have to offer. Use your newsletter to notify your subscribers about special promotions and sales held by your merchant partners.

It’s best to link from your newsletter to a special ‘sales’ page on your site, as opposed to sending them directly to the merchant’s site. That way you can test the effectiveness of your offers by keeping track of the number of visitors who visit that page via your newsletter.

Below is the list of methods that you can use to market affiliate sites.

Google Adwords

• Pay Per Click Search Engines

• Paid Yahoo! Listing

• Google Premium Sponsorships

• Ezine Advertising

• Build an Opt-In Mailing List

• Publish an Electronic Newsletter

• Use Auctions to Promote Your Affiliate Products

• Site Submission Services & Software

• Joint Ventures

• Free Directory Listings

• Write Ezine Articles

• Search Engine Listings

• Group and Forum Postings

• Link Trading & Posting

• Use an Email Signature

• Start Page Traffic Network

• Refer-a-Friend

• Car Decals

• Business Cards

• Personalized Stationery

• Speaking Engagements

• Classified Ads

• Press Releases

• Trade Publications

• Wear Your URL

• Promotional Items

• Tell Your Friends and Family

• Happy Customers

Google Adwords

When you advertise at Google Adwords the ads start running within minutes after you submit your billing information, it is the fastest way to get exposure online. Google is the number one search engine used by internet surfers and online shoppers. They go more than a hundred and fifty million searches on Google everyday and millions more on its partner sites.

Google Adwords are the ads you see displayed in small rectangle boxes running down the right side of the Google search results page. Your ads may be shown on search results pages for Google, Google Directory, Google Groups, and Google’s partner sites, including their partners’ directory results pages. You may choose to have yours ads shown only for search results on Google, if you don’t want to participate in the syndication program.

Google’s current syndication partners include:

• America Online, Inc.

• CompuServe

• Netscape

• AT&T Worldnet

• EarthLink, Inc.

• Sympatico Inc.

Pay Per Click Search Engines

The second fastest way in gaining exposure online is to buy keyword listings on Pay Per Click Search Engines. Pay per click advertising works when advertisers bid on relevant keywords and pay the bid amount each time someone clicks on the link through to their site.

Pay for a Yahoo! Listing

Yahoo! Listings are no longer free; you have to pay for it. As the time of writing, Yahoo! charges $299 (non-refundable) for their ‘Yahoo! Express’ expedited listing service, and $600 for adult-oriented sites. Payment does not guarantee inclusion in the directory. Payment guarantees that a member of Yahoo!’s editorial staff will look at your site, consider your suggestion to include the site in the directory, and respond to you within seven business days from the date that you submit your site for consideration. Payment also guarantees that Yahoo! will respond to your suggestion within seven business days, by either adding or denying the site. If your listing is denied, you have the right to appeal and/or make changes to your site within a certain amount of time and re-submit without making an additional payment.

6. Show Respect: Broken links, graphics and forms are frustrating. Pop-ups, music and noise are maddening. Respect your visitors’ time and space. Make sure your site is free of errors and other annoyances.

7. Be Available: Make it easy for visitors to get in touch with you. A highly visible contact link on every page is usually enough to let visitors know that you are readily available.

9. Go Beyond Expectations: Affiliates often receive emails better handled by the merchant partner. Don’t ignore those emails. Relaying the message promptly brands you as a professional with both the customer and your partner.

10. Give Something Away: Freebies are like samples at a chocolate shop. Few folks will turn them down, and your reputation goes up when they’re good.